Monday, February 2, 2015

M'Lady's Mirror

Pregnant
with possibility, Arnolfi had to have her. That’s what the 1434 painter, Jan
van Eyck displayed. The small convex mirror behind the couple in the painted
bedroom revealed all. It had an eye on the present, and the past. Its convex circular
shape gathered in all that happens in 180 degrees to left and right, and 360
degrees in the round. Yet that which was behind (like that which was in the
past) was entirely forgotten. Unlike humans, it could not recall the image. It
lived only in the present, absorbing the immediate, and taking in the complex
and multiple dimensionality of life that few humans, at a glance, could
possibly be expected to see.

M’Lady
Nancy Sinclair has just reminded me that she bequeathed to me her family
heirloom, the convex mirror now hanging above her fireplace in her living room
in Guildford, South Western Australia, “When I drop off the perch!” Her
phraseology is idiomatic and platitudinous. Yet she is very brave, very
accepting, and generously perspicuous so to email me. At 93 years old and still
young, alert, brilliant, gifted, beautiful, caring and compassionate, M’Lady’s
gift is of a mirror that has travelled with her most of her adult life. It’s seen
her five children grow up. It’s seen her dear departed husband and all her dearest
friends and relatives and visitors as well. It has taken in much of her life.
It has watched her smile and weep. And it still reflects her lonely opening of the
living-room curtains every morning, and the closing of them at night. “You must
tell me now,” she entreated me in her museum-like-house of artefacts when I was
there in 2013, “what item would you like to have from me when I drop off the
perch?”

Awkward
moments, those. With things, which of us does not feel like a vulture?

“Oh,
I couldn’t,” I demurred. “Besides, you’ve a decade or two to go yet; there’ll
be no flopping from a perch, thank you!”

But
when she asked again, and again, I succumbed, and mentioned the convex mirror.
Her blue eyes sparkled as she looked at it, then at me. “That’s exactly what my
beloved Perry wanted too!” she exclaimed. “But he died before I did.” She
smiled again. “It’s yours! When I go. But you must tell me, why?”

I
downloaded van Eck’s ‘The Marriage of Arnolfi’ onto her computer. “When I was a
schoolboy in the late 60’s,” I explained, “our art master, Mr. Payne, asked us
what was special about the painting; what did we notice? For South African boys,
it was a matter of indelicacy, this business of being pregnant, but when he
said, ‘look in the mirror,’ my world of symbolism was born! And now that I’ve
seen that mirror in your family pictures, I know its import to you, its
history. It may well reflect our own present as we stand before it, but it will
always reflect you!”

Present
and past converge and get reflected in the convex surfaces of our lives, get
swallowed up in the concave. Unlike mirrors, we see backwards sometimes more
clearly than our present. (How often have you not wished you could repeat some
passage of time to say or do different things?) Upon reflection, we gather
insights that we did not have in the moment. Yet we are not as objectively
perceptive as mirrors; we are not even as subjectively reflective! We can but
hope to gather into ourselves sufficient unto the moment. How possibly to live
entirely in the now?

The
mirror sees all.

Framed
in the round, reflecting in the round, even when that magical mirror of M’Lady's
makes its dark way packed up in the mail to me one eventual sad day, it will
reflect a past filled with love and vitality and a lifetime of her memories.
And like the indelibility of the magic in the mirror in Van Eck’s painting, I
too shall make M’Lady’s mirror live on in a canvas of my own.